Arbitrary PowerShell Expressions

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PowerShell and Windows 8

The Building Windows 8 blog today had a fantastic post about the virtual storage feature, Storage Spaces. I had heard about this feature back in September but had not really played with it at the time or thought much about it. After reading the post today I’m quite excited, for a couple of reasons.

This strikes me as kind of radical. The conditioning you get, particularly in an IT situation, is; “Redundancy is RAID”, “Reliability is RAID”, “Performance is RAID”. Its kind of a propaganda. In the early days it was Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; “Let’s solve a problem”, then at some point it became Redundant Array of Independent Disks, “Let’s sell you the dream”. It will be interesting to see how the larger Windows populous accepts and utilizes this. I’m in!

The item that got me the most excited was the fact that PowerShell, for the first time I could recall, took front and center on one of these Build blogs. What had me grinning ear to ear was the quote midway through the post, right after the PowerShell examples, and before the GUI examples.

“We now get to take a sneak peak at an alternative easy-to-use tool to configure pools and spaces … you can simply go to Control Panel and walk through the sequence below”

As a PowerShell guy I can take issue with “easy-to-use”, but whatever. However if there is any doubt, and or hope in your Windows admin mind that this PowerShell thing is just a phase, sorry. This is pretty definitive in regards to the mindset within Microsoft. These are radical changes. They don’t have to be scary changes. You do not have to be a programmer to learn and use PowerShell.

The guy who learned the barest basics of PowerShell last week is looking at those commands and saying, “Oh yeah, I totally understand that command”. The guy who learned PowerShell last month is looking at those commands and saying, “I could totally do those 4 lines of PowerShell in 3”, The guy who learned PowerShell six months ago is saying, “I need to look at Get-Help because I bet I can do it in 1 line”. Do you want to be those guys or do you want to be competing with those guys?

There are books on PowerShell, any top Amazon one will do, there are plenty of web resources as well. Don’t worry about v2 or v3, the basics are the basics are the basics. More important then reading is doing. Figure out something you do regularly, learn to do it in PowerShell. Or “create” a problem for yourself to solve in PowerShell, i.e. “I need to rename all these crazy digicam named images to some other crazy name…” Challenge yourself before someone else does. Get radical man!